CHAPTER 2

THE PRISONER

‘Le chemin de la mort et de la honte, c’est Paris …’

Agrippa d’Aubigné¹

‘La Cour est la plus estrange que vous l’ayez
jamais veue. Nous sommes presque tousjours prestz
à nous couper la gorge les uns aux aul tres …’

Henri of Navarre in 1575²

Paris overflowed with gaiety and optimism in the summer of 1572. The marriage about to be celebrated between the new King of Navarre and the Princess Marguerite, Charles IX’s only surviving sister, was acclaimed with real joy because it showed the resolve of Papists and Huguenots to live side by side in harmony and to end the killing and sacrilege which still convulsed the entire Kingdom. It did indeed seem that the policy of the Queen Mother and her Politiques was going to prevail. Even fanatics grew conciliatory. Alas, this outburst of euphoria coincided with Catherine’s terrible realization that Gaspard de Coligny could never be a Politique, that he would accept nothing short of the Reform’s total victory, that for him the idea of coexistence with ‘idolaters’ was a blasphemy; the Admiral’s quiet manner and subtle diplomacy hid inflexible purpose. Worse, not only did she now see that the King himself was incapable of ruling as a Politique but that he was moving away from the Catholic camp into that of the Religion. Worst of all it was likely he would soon throw off her own maternal guidance. For Catherine this meant the destruction of the monarchy and her children’s inheritance.

Though she directed policy she nonetheless depended on controlling the King, the most tragic of all her diseased brood. At twenty-two Charles IX looked ten years older, to judge from Clouet’s portrait, but he was aged by ill health, not maturity. His frail constitution, undermined by tuberculosis, had now been strained beyond endurance by his wild passion for hunting where the thrill of hard riding and the joy of killing helped satisfy his pathological need for violence; knowing himself to be weak, Charles over-compensated. Besides his mother’s dominance he resented the success of Monsieur at Jarnac and Moncontour which had driven this ‘violent ennemi et inesgal ami’³ into a frenzy of jealousy. Feverishly unstable and easily swayed he might well turn against his own family, while dreams of being a great King might lead him into a ruinous war with Spain. His mistress, Marie Touchet, was a Protestant and Charles, who was not without imagination and possessed a real love of poetry, had learnt to admire the Huguenots’ idealism and fervour. He began to listen to Coligny.

For two years Catherine had tried to enlist the Admiral’s support in building a true peace so he had become a member of the Royal Council, living in Paris. This warrior patriarch with his iron charm made a deep impression on Charles and by the autumn of 1572 the King had all but transferred his trust from the Queen Mother to Coligny who was a perfect father figure—indeed Charles actually addressed him as ‘mon père’. During this year the Dutch Sea Beggars had risen while, at the Treaty of Blois, France and England had concluded a mutual pact against Spain. In addition a powerful and growing group of Politiques, moderate Catholic nobles led by the new Duc de Montmorency, had come to believe religious differences would be forgotten in war with Spain. The King was intoxicated at the prospect of invading the Netherlands.

Catherine’s closest ally was her favourite son, Monsieur. At this date Henri, Duc d’Anjou, was an epicene youth of twenty-two, admired not only for his good looks and brilliant intelligence but also for his gallantry during the Third War of Religion. His homosexuality was not yet apparent for he enjoyed a charming mistress nor had he given way to those strange impulses of frivolity and superstition which later ruined him. Indeed it must have seemed that should Henri of Anjou succeed to the throne France might have her greatest King since Louis XII. It was not surprising that his half crazy brother should distrust him. Monsieur had everything to gain from Catherine retaining her supremacy, much to lose were she supplanted. He had driven Coligny from the field and would do so again—this time from the Louvre.

Marguerite de Valois, the future bride of Henri of Navarre and the sole remaining daughter of Henri II, was nineteen, only seven months older than her future husband but already a byword for beauty, learning and promiscuity. Her portraits show a brunette (though she frequently wore a blonde wig) with a round, pudding face and sly eyes, yet all contemporaries agree on her extraordinary good looks. Brantôme, who adored her, wrote ‘for if in the world there has ever been one more perfect in beauty it is the Queen of Navarre … and I think that all women who are, who shall be and who ever were are ugly near her’.⁴ He describes her faultless dressing and her exquisite grace in dancing the Spanish pavane, the Italian passamezzo and the branle with lights and torches. A gifted linguist who spoke Greek with a fluency unusual even among savants, she enjoyed theology no less than the classics. She had already taken lovers, though not from the age of twelve as the violently hostile Divorce Satyrique claims;⁵ later her impudiques baisersbecame legendary.⁶

It was partly because of her that the Guises and the Catholic extremists were in a temporary eclipse. At seventeen Marguerite had taken a wild fancy to the young and handsome Henri de Guise, ‘fort caressé des dames’. The Cardinal of Lorraine was eager for such a match which would bring his house still nearer the throne. Pierre de L’Estoile’s outrageous belief that the Queen Mother slept with the Cardinal was peculiarly ill-founded, for she abominated that domineering hierarch with whom she had a long score to settle. This latest intrigue angered Catherine and infuriated Charles, and together with his party’s opposition to the ‘Shameful Peace’ of St Germain, made it necessary for the Cardinal-Archbishop to leave court in 1570 while Duc Henri was safely married in the autumn of that year to a strong-minded widow, the Princesse de Croy.

The Queen Mother was anxious to demonstrate her genuine desire for peace between Papists and Huguenots. As titular head of the Protestants of France Henri of Navarre was the obvious bridegroom for Marguerite de Valois. The English ambassador, Francis Walsingham, believed that such a marriage might strengthen the French Crown to an unwelcome degree and tried to block it by offering, with questionable sincerity, the hand of his Queen ‘bien que l’aage feust fort inégal’,⁷ Henri being eighteen and Elizabeth thirty-six. Eventually Queen Jeanne decided against the bizarre union; such a marriage makes fascinating speculation—a partnership between the Virgin Queen and the Vert Galant.⁸ But Jeanne was no less opposed to her son’s marriage with Marguerite—she knew the Valois court and trembled for his virtue were he allied to such a wanton. There was the obstacle of the Religion and she wrote to him of his intended bride that ‘sy elle demeure opiniastre en sa religion il ne peult estre … que ce marriage ne fust la ruyne premierement de nos amis et de nos pays’.⁹ At last she decided that the marriage would benefit the Reform; possibly Coligny told her it would strengthen his position. On the other hand the Papacy was loath to grant a dispensation, but the Cardinal de Bourbon who was to officiate at the marriage was told, falsely, that Papal permission was on its way.

The great nobles of the Kingdom, Protestant and Catholic, flocked to Paris, with a few notable exceptions, the Duc de Montmorency who smelt some sort of evil in the wind and Sully’s father who foresaw that ‘the bridal favours would be very red’.¹⁰ All the leading Huguenots were there, including the Comte de la Rochefoucauld and the Vidâme de Chartres, though one future paladin of the religion, Agrippa d’Aubigné, had to leave hurriedly after killing a royal archer in a duel. They had good reason to feel safe for not even the wily Admiral smelt treachery while the King showed them special favour.

On 18 August the noticeably unenthusiastic couple were married on a scaffold draped in cloth of gold, outside Notre Dame. Years later Marguerite remembered how she was dressed; ‘moy habillé à la royale’,¹¹ with a crown, an ermine cape studded with jewels, and a great blue cloak four ells long born by three princesses. The festivities lasted for nearly a week with balls, suppers and divertissements; one tableau at the Louvre, in which the King and his two brothers took part, seemed to imply that Huguenots generally went to hell, an imputation which caused much amusement.

In the meantime Catherine, though by nature averse to bloodshed, had reluctantly decided that there was no way of eliminating Gaspard de Coligny other than assassination. Every day he established himself more firmly in the King’s graces. His demise would leave the Huguenots leaderless while the obvious scapegoats were the Guises who had never ceased to mutter threats of vengeance against the Admiral for his alleged complicity in the murder of Duke François. Only one man would die, in the interests of peace, and his death would ensure the continuity of the Politique policy. Monsieur, always his mother’s boy, supported her in this tempting but dangerous resolution. Unfortunately for them no amount of careful planning could eliminate the human element.

On the morning of 22 August that skilled bravo and killer, the Sieur de Maurevert, fired his arquebus from a window, twice. The Queen Mother had given the Guises carte blanche to take their revenge. Coligny staggered; his finger was smashed and there was a bullet in his elbow but he remained standing. His attendants rushed into the house from where the shots had come but found only a smoking arquebus and heard a galloping horse. No one looked further than the Guises—for the time being.

Catherine was appalled; an enquiry would disgrace her, leaving a triumphant Coligny, to whom Charles must surely turn, free at last to lead France into a suicidal struggle with Spain during which the country’s Catholic majority would certainly rise in rebellion. In the meantime her own life was in danger; worse, so was Monsieur’s. There was only one way out of this terrible impasse, a bloody way, but if as a woman faced with ruin Catherine knew fear she also possessed such a woman’s lack of scruple; the Guises must be quickly and quietly unleashed to kill the Huguenot leaders and the Admiral with them, for ‘tous les oiseaux estoient en cage’.¹² Bereft of their great lords the Protestant commons would soon come to heel. Monsieur, that hardly less feminine son, again agreed with the Queen Mother in her grim resolve.

All that day the Huguenots raged, vowing that they would have satisfaction for the wounds of their beloved patriarch. In her memoirs Queen Marguerite recorded that when she went to her husband’s bed on the night of 22 August she found it surrounded by thirty or forty Huguenots, who she did not yet know as she had only been married for a few days, and how they did nothing but talk of the misfortune which had befallen Monsieur l’Admiral, resolving that as soon as it was day they would demand justice of the King against Monsieur de Guise. ‘Le temps se passa de cette façon sans fermer l’oeil.’¹³

The King still favoured Coligny, whom he continued to call ‘mon père’, but on the evening of Saturday the 23rd his mother bullied him into submission at a council meeting with stories of plots by the Religion. Her maternal instinct did not fail; Charles IX, unbalanced and bewildered as ever, and made even more feverish than usual by this barrage of accusation, broke down screaming ‘Kill them all’. He had given his assent to the massacre of St Bartholomew whose eve it was. Besides the bravos and bully-boys of the Guise household many others were eagerly waiting to begin the good work, not only the King’s guards and those of Monsieur but also the great bourgeois and the mob of Paris, at one in their hatred of heretics.

All save a few Catholics saw the horror which they were about to perpetrate as an act of self defence and the Huguenots as the real aggressors. For years this small minority had kept the Kingdom in anarchy and misery, terrorizing their ‘idolatrous’ neighbours; few days passed without reports of some fresh sacrilege in which Protestants profaned the House of God, throwing down its crucifix, smashing its statues and blowing up its altar with gunpowder, outraging the very Sacrament itself, and hunting down its priests. Each villager dreaded the descent of bandit partisans, every townsman lived in fear of rabble roused to frenzy by sectarian bigots. But now the Counter-Reformation had begun to teach its flock that, far from being a sin, it was a mercy to kill heretics so that they might sin no more.¹⁴ From a purely secular point of view the Catholic Parisians were about to rescue the Kingdom from a divisive poison unknown to their forefathers. It must be remembered that most, though not all, sixteenth-century Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, thought tolerance a sin. This attitude was now to be given terrible expression in ‘the Matins of Paris’.

At four o’clock in the morning of Sunday 24 August the door of Coligny’s bedroom in his lodging was broken down by Guise’s swordsmen and Monsieur’s Swiss. The Admiral was skewered with a pike, then flung out of the window into the street below where the Duke and a bastard brother kicked the dead man’s face; after further mutilation the battered corpse was hanged by its heels from the public gibbet. At the Louvre Charles personally gave the orders to kill the Huguenot nobles. Condé and the King of Navarre were summoned to the King’s chamber but their attendants were barred from entering; ‘Goodbye, my friends,’ said Henri, ‘God knows if we will ever see each other again.’ He and Condé were spared because they were Princes of the Blood and there is no foundation for Brantôme’s claim that Marguerite saved her husband’s life, nor for the legend that she hid him under the skirts of her farthingale.

However, she saved other lives. The Queen of Navarre was asleep when the Vicomte de Leran, wounded by a sword cut in the neck and a halberd thrust in the arm, burst into her room pursued by a band of enraged archers and flung himself on to her bed; the Queen and the Vicomte rolled on to the floor—‘nous crions tous deux et estions aussy effrayés l’un que l’autre’.¹⁵ Fortunately the Captain of the Guard came in and, shaking with laughter, ordered his men out. When Marguerite went into the corridor a Huguenot courtier was killed with a halberd only three paces from her, while in Mme de Lorraine’s room she found two of her husband’s gentlemen who begged her to save them; to do so she had to beseech the Queen Mother and the King on her knees.

The Louvre’s staircases, chambers, withdrawing rooms and ante-chambers all dripped with blood and were littered with dead or dying Protestant lords, though many had been assembled in a courtyard to be cut down by the royal soldiery. Henri and his cousin Condé spent a terrifying night listening to their friends’ screams, some of whom were ‘murdered disrespectfully before their eyes’,¹⁶ and fearing that the demented Charles might turn on them. However, he was too busy, firing happily at his Protestant subjects with an arquebus from the palace windows.

The mob, organized by the municipality of Paris, was taking care of the Huguenot commons with the same gusto which its descendants would one day give to hunting enemies of the Revolution. The tocsin which summoned the Faithful, to kill, also warned the Religion so that a few of its nobles who had slept outside the Louvre were able to escape, pursued by Guise at full gallop, but most of the Protestant bourgeois were hounded to their deaths in a totentanz of lynching and plunder. The troops of the King and Monsieur assisted the loyal Parisians in countless man-hunts; some heretics were chased over the rooftops or into cellars before being cut down, many were flung into the ‘Seine’s empurpled flood’ including a basketful of babies, for neither children nor pregnant women were spared and whole families had their throats slit. Even great Catholic nobles joined in the killing; old Marshal de Tavannes tottered through the streets brandishing his sword and shouting ‘bleed them, bleed them—doctors say that bleeding is as good in August as in May’. Paris became a slaughterhouse. The rabble got out of hand and over five hundred houses were sacked, many rich Papists dying too, falsely accused of heresy by those who coveted their wealth. The killing went on throughout Sunday and Monday until most of the Faithful were exhausted, though for several days survivors continued to be flushed out and butchered. Estimates of just how many died vary, but it cannot have been less than four thousand.

This figure was more than doubled in the provinces where local fanatics were roused by the thrilling tales from Paris. Within the octave of St Bartholomew seven hundred Protestants were despatched in the prison at Lyons to which they had gone for their own safety, while the mobs went hunting in a score of towns, frequently joined by the royal garrisons. At Rouen zealots were heartened in their pious work by the bodies which came floating down the river from Paris. Perhaps ten thousand provincial Huguenots died in September.

At the time it was generally believed that at least a hundred thousand had been slain. Europe reacted predictably, Protestant rulers like Elizabeth being horrified while sovereigns such as the Emperor or the King of Poland who had both Protestant and Catholic subjects were disapproving. Philip II laughed heartily, a rare and notable occurrence, and Pope Gregory XIII said that the news was better than that of fifty Lepantos, he and the College of Cardinals attending a Te Deum after which the cannon of St Angelo fired salutes and Rome was illuminated for three nights. It is indicative of the mind of the time that many Huguenots instead of crying out for vengeance believed that the massacre was a visitation of God brought upon them by too much ambition. Some French Protestants even abjured the Religion and it is undoubtedly true that these bloody events were the beginning of the Catholic triumph.

However, the immediate result within France was the Fourth War of Religion. Though one of the Huguenots’ places de sûreté was taken three remained. Fighting men of the Reform rose throughout France, riding to rallying points in the South and West, above all to La Rochelle. Their great lords were dead and many of their rich bourgeois had fled abroad but new leaders came forward, country squires and poor gentlemen who lived by soldiering, while preachers whipped up morale like the chaplains of Cromwell’s army whose troopers the soldiers of Protestant France anticipated in so many ways. The war was one of sieges, in particular the siege of La Rochelle, ‘bastion of the Gospel’. This western sea-port, well fortified now for many years and manned by vigorous merchants and tough sailors, easily revictualled from England, was a hard nut to crack, too hard for the Royal army under Monsieur which besieged it from February 1573. Four assaults were beaten back with ferocious resolution. Then in May Monsieur was elected King of Poland so peace was proclaimed in July at the Treaty of La Rochelle whereby the Religion was given freedom of worship in those towns which were places de sûreté and freedom of conscience elsewhere.

Henri had had to be present during the siege of his former brethren. After the St Bartholomew he and Condé had been given a choice of ‘La mort ou la Messe’¹⁷ by a raging Charles IX; on St Michael’s Day, 29 September 1572, the new Papist received Communion at Mass with his brother Knights of St Michael wearing the Order’s white habit and red hood—the Queen Mother was seen to smile. On 3 October the King of Navarre was made to beg the Pope’s pardon and on 16 October to publish an ineffectual edict which re-established Catholicism in Béarn. During the La Rochelle expedition he surprised people by ‘faisant bonne mine’ and bearing no apparent resentment. Indeed he had played tennis with the Duc de Guise only a few weeks after the Paris Matins. However, he remained a virtual prisoner at the Royal court.

For more than three years he would be under close surveillance, sometimes under arrest. ‘He was subjected to a thousand caprices and a thousand insults from the court; at times free, oftener closely confined, and treated as a criminal.’¹⁸ Throughout this time he did his best to disarm suspicion so that he could escape. He assumed a role which Dumas shrewdly interpreted as ‘Nul désir, nulle ambition, nulle capacité; je suis un bon gentilhomme de campagne, pauvre, sensuel et timide …’.¹⁹ Ironically, this triumph of hypocrisy would one day be rivalled by his grandson Charles II’s heroic ‘conversion’ to the Kirk during that brief and awful sojourn at Holyrood as a guest of the distrustful Covenanters. Despite the demands on his self control and the awareness of very real danger, for he was surrounded by enemies as well as exposed to Charles IX’s mad rages, Henri became noted for his astonishing amiability and his capacity for enjoyment; ‘il aimoit la frequentation des gens qui estoient d’humour gaie et joviale’,²⁰ hunting, playing tennis, gambling and whoring with unflagging zest. If he maintained a decorous Catholicism—receiving Communion and taking part in flagellant processions—he seemed to wish only for a life of pleasure. Though he was an eighteen-year-old boy when he began his captivity, untried and without experience, and retained a youthful look throughout by remaining unfashionably clean shaven, he did not altogether deceive Catherine who never underestimated her opponents. But in these early days it was impossible to know that here was an adversary far more wily than Coligny. The real reason for the Béarnais’ detention was simply that he was a Prince of the Blood who might be used as a figurehead by the Religion.

Henri’s life at the court of Charles IX was rendered still more uneasy by his odd relationship with his wife. From the start the marriage was a failure. Marguerite’s lack of enthusiasm had been remarked on at the wedding when the King all but forced her to make the responses yet even if she remained in love with Guise this does not explain Henri’s lack of attraction for her—nor hers for him. Physical incompatibility is unlikely as both were notorious for sexual voracity, and infidelity would have played small part even if d’Aubigné, who loathed her, asserts that Henri was upset by his Queen’s gallantries.²¹ Some historians have depicted the natural aversion of an exquisite, Italianate blue-stocking for a wild mountaineer from the provinces but this is doubtful; Henri was a great Prince of high education with sophisticated tastes who had been brought up in close proximity to his bride until the age of thirteen and who only acquired rough habits after years of campaigning. Brantôme believed that the fundamental reason was religious difference, for Marguerite, despite her promiscuity, was a devout Catholic.²² However, the most probable explanation is the simplest—temperamental incompatibility. Henri was too human and too well balanced to enjoy a wife so complicated and eccentric as the last Princess of the perverse Valois. Nevertheless they were excellent friends, tolerating each other’s love affairs with perfect equanimity, and forwarding each other’s interests.

François, Duc d’Alençon, the youngest of Catherine’s children, was also the most repellent, physically as well as morally. Dwarfish and dark skinned, all contemporaries agree on his ugliness, some alleging that smallpox had given him a double nose. Writing of a projected marriage with Queen Elizabeth, Walsingham stated that the ‘great impediment that I find in the same is the contentment of the eye. The Gentleman sure is void of any good favour, besides the blemish of the small pocks’;²³ when the English Queen finally set eyes on François she named him ‘the frog’. His nature was even less pleasant than his person, false, greedy and cowardly. His brothers loathed him while his mother had small liking for this untrustworthy son. Marguerite was his only friend, a relationship which even modern historians suggest was incestuous. Brother and sister formed an alliance with Henri which was regarded with deep disfavour by his mother-in-law. Later Henri credited his brother-in-law with ‘a double heart, a soul as maligned and deformed as his body’, but for the moment he seemed to hold him in deep affection.

His mother-in-law’s unblinking scrutiny, suave but baleful, was perhaps the most terrifying circumstance. Well informed courtiers said she was a poisoner and Henri, who possibly suspected her of murdering his mother, must have feared that any illness or malaise meant poison, that each mouthful of food or drink might be his last. In 1575 a scurrilous pamphlet insinuated that ‘this Florentine Brunhilda’²⁴ would have seen he died by strange pains had not Condé managed to escape.²⁵ As yet Catherine had not identified Henri of Navarre with ‘le grand Chyren’ of Nostradamus’ verse:

Au chef du monde le grand Chyren sera
Plus outre après aymé, criant, redouté:
Son bruit et los les cieux surpassera,
Et du seul titre victeur fort contenté.

Nostradamus is always almost impossible to translate, since he deliberately used vague grammar and obscure vocabulary in order to be as enigmatic as possible. However, ‘le grand Chyren’ is an anagram for Henri, and the general sense of these lines is that Henri’s deeds will astound the heavens, while nothing less than the title of conqueror will satisfy him. Had Catherine understood this prophecy her son-in-law would have had real cause for terror. As it was his life was a nightmare even if his courage never failed him.

A new political alignment had now emerged, far more complex than the old, simple division into Papist and Huguenot, producing a situation which might easily end in the Kingdom’s collapse and disintegration. ‘Malcontents’ was the name given to d’Alençon’s party of discontented courtiers, adventurers very like those who would later follow Elizabeth of England’s foolish favourite, the Earl of Essex; men so unprincipled were quite ready to side with heretics. As yet fewer but much more formidable were the Politiques, Catholics who preferred peace to religious war and were therefore also prepared to ally with Protestants. St Bartholomew had made the latter stronger than before, if no more numerous; hostilities had never ceased in the South, whose Huguenots were linked to those of the ‘pacified’ North and West by the Protestant Union. While in places de sûretélike La Rochelle there was a contempt for Royal authority and a desire for self-rule which approached republicanism, a government tantamount to a republic had already been set up in Languedoc.

Sir John Neale has given a powerful and succinct description:

Languedoc was divided into two governments, centred at Nîmes and Montauban, each with a Count at the head controlled by an elected council or estates, which in important matters consulted the estates of each diocese. The two supreme councils were given control of finance, and money was obtained by levying taxes on towns and villages, whether they were Huguenot or Catholic…. All France south of the Loire was in due course proclaimed to be under Damville as governor and general chief, while he in turn acknowledged the supremacy of the Prince of Condé, who had escaped from Court and was safe in Germany. A veritable republican government was elaborated, with a Council of State to advise Damville, an Assembly of Deputies, Provincial Councils, offices of Justice and Finance, four Law Courts, and a financial division of the whole area. Customs duties and taxes were levied, and this revolutionary organisation ran its own police, schools and hospitals. Condé and Damville were assigned specified salaries, and money and authority were provided to levy troops abroad.²⁶

Significantly Damville, a younger brother of the Duc de Montmorency, was a Catholic. No longer were Papists necessarily Royalists. Any further advance by the threefold alliance of Huguenots, Malcontents and Politiques meant the emergence of other republics like Languedoc and the possible dissolution of the Kingdom. This terrible new opposition would be still more dangerous if led by a Prince of the Blood. It was therefore understandable that Catherine should dread the escape of either Henri or François d’Alençon.

Close watch was kept on the King of Navarre who complained of Royal guards searching his apartments and even looking under his bed. In any case the court always swarmed with spies.²⁷ However, the glittering prospect of the Huguenot leadership was always in his mind. His first attempt to escape, together with d’Alençon, while hunting at St Germain in February 1574 was betrayed and the two Princes were arrested. François behaved despicably, begging the King’s forgiveness on his knees and confessing that the Huguenots were about to rise, but Henri kept his nerve and coolly explained that he simply wanted to return to Navarre. In April they had another try, attempting as before to escape from St Germain and join the rebels who had now risen. Again the plot was betrayed. This time the two Princes were incarcerated in the strong castle of Vincennes. Once more d’Alençon broke down while Henri stayed cool, claiming that he went in fear of the Guises.

Their two chief abettors, the Vicomte de la Molle and Count Annibale de Coconato, were tortured and beheaded by the specific orders of an infuriated Charles IX.²⁸ After their deaths these somewhat unsavoury gentlemen achieved a certain distinction. La Molle, an ingratiating adventurer who was renowned at court for his sexual prowess, had been Queen Marguerite’s current lover while Coconato, a ferocious bravo who was the Captain of d’Alençon’s bodyguard, had been that of the Duchesse de Nevers. Popular rumour believed that these great ladies bought their lovers’ remains from the executioner and buried them secretly by night; as they had been quartered as well as beheaded this must have been a messy business. An even more dramatic version of the tale claims that Marguerite embalmed La Molle’s head, had it set with jewels and placed in a lead casket, and then interred it with her own hands.²⁹

Because his illness grew worse at exactly the same time that Henri and d’Alençon began their plotting, King Charles, ‘his eyes ghastly and his countenance fierce’,³⁰ suspected poison or witchcraft, screaming out that he was being ‘horriblement et cruellement tourmenté’.³¹ Hence the execution of La Molle and Coconato and the arrest of two Italian astrologers. In fact the King was dying of pulmonary tuberculosis which induced ‘a bloody sweat’ of ecchymoses or effusions of blood all over his body. Understandably Huguenots claimed that, like Richard III, the last hallucinated days of this ‘grand blasphémateur’³² were further tormented by the memory of evil deeds, one Protestant courtier alleging that since the St Bartholomew the King had had no rest undisturbed by starts and groans.³³ Charles IX died an agonized death on 30 May 1574. Before the end he summoned Henri and, saying goodbye with surprising affection, commended his wife and daughter to him.³⁴

Monsieur, the King of Poland, who now succeeded as Henri III was far away, sulking in his palace at Cracow where he had taken refuge from his unloved and demanding subjects—‘cete nation plus seuere et serieuse que la nostre’.³⁵ Unable to speak Polish he had given way to melancholy and idleness while his barbarous and perpetually drunken nobles, who shaved their heads like Tartars, loudly insisted that the fastidious young Valois must marry the forty-year-old Królewna Anna, the last Princess of their native Jagiellon dynasty. If unruly they were infuriatingly loyal and would not let ‘Król Henryk’ leave for France, shrewdly suspecting he would never return. He therefore gave a banquet for their leaders and after his guests had drunk themselves into a stupor fled in diguise³⁶ to Vienna, hotly pursued by tearful Poles during an epic flight in which he rode his horse into the ground. Reaction from this terrible interlude set in at Venice where, after a solemn entrance up the Grand Canal when he was received by the Doge and Senate, he gave himself up to fêtes and entertainments and the purchase of jewels, glass, rich clothes and scents.

Henri III returned to France in the autumn of 1574, freeing d’Alençon and his cousin of Navarre on his arrival; it had been necessary to confine them during his absence because the Fifth War of Religion which had broken out in February was still raging with no prospect of abatement and they were therefore likely to make determined efforts to join the rebels. After the usual protestations of loyalty Navarre made another unsuccessful attempt to escape in July.

The new King’s court was certainly very different from the wildejagd of Charles IX but perhaps even more nerve-racking. Though sufficiently normal to have several mistresses and marry for love Henri III gave way increasingly to homosexual tendencies so that the Louvre became a byword for unnatural vice, where ‘l’amour philosophique et sacré’ was openly, and shrilly, proclaimed. On occasion this Renaissance Heliogabulus dressed as a woman, while he was invariably surrounded by mignons, more rouged, curled and bedecked than any woman, young men of obscure origin who vied for the King’s favour and whose noisy quarrels frequently ended in lethal duels. There were other ‘deportemens mols et effemés’³⁷ which hardly endeared their King to a virile and warlike nobility; he hid in the cellars when it thundered and, worst of all, at his Coronation in 1575 he shrieked that the Crown had hurt him when it was placed on his head.³⁸ These eccentricities took time to emerge in full bloom but as early as Christmas 1574 France was startled to learn that His Most Christian Majesty, always devout, had taken part in a procession of flagellant penitents where barefoot courtiers had whipped each other with enthusiasm, the King wearing a necklace of little skulls. Yet this strange, Proustian figure could in his rare moments of energy show bravery and wisdom and prove that he was no less of a statesman than his mother, a true King who inspired genuine affection as well as fear. Indeed he would one day destroy himself by his determination to rule. And his rage could be terrible—he was the only one of her children of whom Catherine was ever frightened even if she loved him the best.

Henri III seems to have liked rather than disliked his Béarnais cousin; when the King fell ill in 1575, suspecting that Monsieur had poisoned him, he told Henri to seize the throne in the event of his death. But the Béarnais’ position grew daily more uncomfortable. He was closely watched by the King’s beloved bully-boys, such as the arrogant Colonel of the Royal guard, Louis de Guast, while Catherine decided that the friendship with d’Alençon, now known as Monsieur, must be broken. To do so she employed an even more Machiavellian method than usual—she would set Henri of Navarre himself against Queen Marguerite who would complain to Monsieur.

Charlotte de Beaune, Baronne de Sauve, the Queen Mother’s lady-in-waiting and a member of the escadron volant was an ideal instrument. This beautiful and accomplished blonde, twenty-five years old and the first of Henri’s great loves, was a collector of conquests who had added not only Henri but also Monsieur to her list of triumphs and the two Princes were competing for her with some jealousy. Relations between them deteriorated to such an extent that in 1575 Henri wrote to Jean d’Albret (at Coarraze)—the son of his old governess—that

We [i.e. the court] are nearly always ready to cut each other’s throats. We carry daggers and wear mail shirts, even breastplates, under our cloaks…. You have no idea how hardy I am for I have everyone against me. The faction of which you know all want me dead for Monsieur’s sake and, for the third time, have forbidden my mistress to speak to me, keeping so close to her that she doesn’t even dare look at me. I’m only waiting for the moment when I shall have to fight a pitched battle as they all say they’re going to kill me and I’d like to forestall them….³⁹

Marguerite, in her memoirs, recorded her astonishment on hearing that Mme de Sauve was trying to turn Henri against her. Despite her own notorious affairs with François de Balsac d’Entragues and a famous swordsman, ‘the brave Bussy’, the attempt failed, for Marguerite and her husband were too shrewd to be deceived and too little in love with each other to be jealous. Nonetheless Henri remained enamoured of Charlotte de Sauve for some time to come, maintaining amiable relations for many years. The story conjures up the labyrinthine intrigue and venomous rumour, which together with fear of poison or the dagger, infected the air of the last Valois court, where amidst the stately dances and gorgeous divertissements at the Louvre and the Tuileries or during the splendid ritual of hunting at St Germain, ruin or violent death lay in wait for so many great noblemen.

The Crown, once again near bankruptcy, proved incapable of dispersing the Huguenot forces, who were secretly subsidised by Elizabeth of England, while Languedoc and the other all but independent régimes continued to flourish. If Henri could reach Béarn he would indeed be a sovereign in this feudal anarchy which was becoming separatism. His discontent reached a peak even when Monsieur succeeded in escaping, alone, in September 1575. But the captive King of Navarre had to go on playing the man of pleasure, pretending to have quarrelled with d’Alençon,⁴⁰ affecting complete indifference towards the Huguenot party, and cultivating the friendship of the Duc de Guise. It was an astonishing excercise of self control by a young man who was near to despair.

In 1575 the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michel, sent the Serene Republic a detailed description of the young King of Navarre who was ‘of medium height but very well built, with no beard as yet, brown skinned, and “ardito e molto vivo come era la madre”; he is pleasant, in every way affable and very friendly in manner, and generous too, so people say. He is devoted to hunting in which he spends all his time’.⁴¹ Messer Giovanni also noted that Henri still dreamt of Navarre and that he spoke a little too freely—‘parlando forse troppo pià liberamente’—about recovering his lost provinces.⁴² Sully had already observed these hopes which were encouraged by secret contacts with the Moriscos. It is scarcely to be wondered at that the captive King should take refuge in such fantasies.

However, by January 1576 he had finally given way to hopeless misery which perhaps induced the fever that made him take to his bed. It also inclined his mind to thoughts of religion. This debaucher of maidens and cheerful maker of cuckolds may seem an unlikely Calvinist. But Puritans are tempted no less than Papists, nor need they be gloomy; assurance of salvation is an excellent reason for gaiety—British historians tend to forget that so joyous a cavalier as Montrose was a devout Presbyterian. In the sixteenth century French Protestantism was an aristocratic and seductive creed, distinguished by the freshness and purity of its religious experience and by a lyrical awareness of the reality of God’s love; it is significant that many of the period’s poets were Huguenots. Certainly no man so typical of his age as Henri, however much a sinner and a sceptic, would have fallen into atheism which could then be plumbed only by a few execrated misfits. In 1574 L’Estoile noted with approval that ‘a wretched atheist and madman (one is never one without being the other) … was hanged and strangled at Paris, his body burnt with his book …’;⁴³ no doubt Henri approved too. Perhaps he had small sense of the spiritual and gave little thought to his salvation, like those who respect art without appreciating it, but, despite Montaigne’s suspicions at a later date, he nonetheless accepted his religion, that of a Protestant Christian, croyant though hardlypratiquant. Even when he professed Catholicism, in his heart he remained a Calvinist, until the final conversion at St Denis.

So, lying on his bed. Henri turned to the comfort of the Psalms, reciting one which expressed perfectly his frustration and despair:

O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: O let my prayer enter into thy presence, incline thine ear unto my calling.

For my soul is full of trouble: and my life draweth nigh unto hell….

Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me: and made me to be abhorred of them.

I am so fast in prison: that I cannot get forth….

I am in misery, and like unto him that is at the point to die: even from my youth up thy terrors have

I suffered with a troubled mind….

By chance two gentlemen of his household waiting in the antechamber heard him. Zealous Huguenots, they rushed in and one, d’Aubigné, asked the King of Navarre whether God still lived within him, promising that if He did anything was possible, even escape.⁴⁴

Agrippa d’Aubigné was an heroic figure, poet, swordsman and mystic. Of noble but obscure origin, he was definitely not a natural child of Jeanne d’Albret as has been claimed, though he would certainly have been a son far more to her taste than Henri. Still only twenty-four in 1576 he had been a soldier since he was fifteen; at the age of eight his father had made him swear on the gory heads of the executed conspirators of Amboise that he would fight for the Religion. Despite his burning Calvinist faith Agrippa, like Henri, had fallen into sin; not only was he a popular ladies’ man at court who had taken a mistress but he had actually fought against his brethren, under the Duc de Guise. He became the King of Navarre’s gentleman-in-waiting in 1573 but had spent much time away from his master. Now he believed that he was an instrument of God, sent to free Henri from a Babylonian captivity. That a follower of such fine and tempered steel should be at Henri’s side at this moment was to have incalculable consequences. Agrippa would become his King’s ‘right arm and on some days his conscience too’.

To Henri his gentleman’s startling irruption must have seemed miraculous; there is something of Bruce and the spider in the story so carefully recorded by Agrippa years later, of St Joan and the Dauphin at Bourges. It was the beginning of the salvation not only of Henri but of France. His fever left him and with renewed energy he started to plan one more attempt at escape.

He gave a last brilliant performance as the man of pleasure without ambition. Having hidden himself in Paris he then spread the rumour that the King of Navarre had fled while hunting; he could be found nowhere and in the ensuing panic it was assumed that he had been successful. Next day, 1 February, when the disconsolate Henri III and his mother were at Mass in the Sainte Chapelle, he came to them, booted and spurred as though returning from hunting and laughed that as they wanted to see him, here he was.⁴⁵ After this he went on to the Duc de Guise to whom he showed deep affection and expressed a ludicrous belief that soon he would be made Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom.⁴⁶

Henri spent 3 February 1576 hunting near St Germain with every intention of returning to Paris but that evening when he was about to leave Senlis for home, after a hard day in the saddle, a breathless d’Aubigné suddenly appeared with news that their plans had been betrayed. Henri was aghast but the fiery Agrippa rallied his master—‘le chemin de la mort et de la honte, c’est Paris; ceux de la vie et de la gloire sont par tout d’ailleurs …’.⁴⁷ Overpowering the few King’s men present Henri and his friends galloped into the darkness towards Frontenac, finding their way through the trackless forest with great difficulty in ‘une nuict très obscure et fort glacieuse’.⁴⁸ Next morning they met a gentleman who offered to guide them. Not recognizing the King of Navarre he jokingly asked for news of the court, especially of the Princesses’ love affairs in which Queen Marguerite was so prominent. Henri laughed but when ‘nôtre pauvre Croniqueur des amours des Princesses’⁴⁹ learnt his identity he was so panic-stricken that he dared not go home for three days. Henri did not pause in his flight southwards until they reached Samur three weeks later.

Even if the odds were less, that first desperate gallop from Senlis was as much a turning point in the Béarnais’ life as the flight from Worcester was for his grandson seventy-five years later. One of the noblemen who rode with him remembered afterwards that Henri did not speak until they crossed the Loire, whereupon he heaved a long sigh and said, ‘God be praised Who has delivered me; at Paris they killed the Queen my mother, they murdered the Admiral and all our best servants, and would have treated me no better had not God protected me. I will never return there unless they drag me.’ Then, grinning, he added that he only regretted leaving two things behind; the Mass and his wife. ‘I will try to manage without Mass but I can’t do without my wife and I mean to have her.’⁵⁰The mask which had almost slipped was now in place again.